2020 Movies update: 7 movies watched in Feb. Probably the best movie I've seen this month was Knives Out. (Jojo Rabbit close second.) The goal of 200 movies for the year is getting farther! As for TV, I think most of my watching time was spent rewatching Rick and Morty for quiz purposes lol. Well, Criminal Minds ended, so there's that. Arrowverse has been meh, though I did enjoy Supergirl's 100th episode. Hm, I guess I haven't actually watched a lot of stuff in the past month. There's a ton of stuff that I've been wanting to watch but haven't
2020 February
- In 2010 I took a short work hiatus which meant I was often home for most of the day. Back then Netflix wasn't really a thing, so I would often have local cable TV playing in the background of whatever I was doing. And it was because of this that I started regularly watching police procedurals. They're not the cleverest or most highbrow of shows, but they're more like a guilty pleasure. Most of it was NCIS, which the cable channels loved showing for some reason, but during that time I also picked up other shows like the quirky Bones
2020 January
- I wasn't sure if I should continue this watching-lately series since I already set up a separate page for listing my 2020 movies watched. It might have been more consistent to have a list for the 2020 TV shows also? But then again, TV shows are a much different beast, since each show/season is broken into an episode and sometimes you watch them all in one go or sometimes over the span of a few months. So maybe let's keep this going for the while. So yeah, movies. From the list for January, I think the best one was Parasite.
- So the back half of the CW Arrowverse's epic Crisis on Infinite Earth's crossover finally aired this week, and I promised more words about the Arrowverse and the crossover last month, so here we are. Spoilers abound! On Jan. 15, 2020, 1:05 p.m. I wrote: #CrisisOnInfiniteEarths spoiler free review: low budget, pacing and writing issues, but idc because all the dc comics fan service kept making me smile First the bad: as noted above, writing and pacing and budget issues plague the crossover, but this is typical of the Arrowverse as a whole. TBH sometimes I question why I still
- Apparently I'm not done looking back at the 2010s yet. I had some "top tens of 2010s" discussions with some friends recently, here are my personal lists, each in no particular order: My Top Ten Movies of the 2010s Avengers Endgame (2019).. I'm keeping only one slot per franchise, so I had to choose an MCU movies for this. Runner-ups for this slot were Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America Winter Soldier, and individually either one of those movies might be around the same or better than Endgame, but Endgame is the culmination of a decade's worth of movies
2019 December
- Been watching a lot of things this December. I finally got back on The Expanse after finishing S1 more than a year ago. I only finished S2, but it was already a vast improvement over S1. S1 felt like a lot of meandering around until the characters actually ran into the plot. S2 was stronger, faster-paced, and there's always a lot of things going on in each episode. I really like this series now, looking forward to S3 and S4 when I have the time. Netflix-wise, I enjoyed their recently-added Jeopardy series (always a great show to have playing in
2019 November
Nothing in the cinema this month (going to the cinema is expensive!). I did watch a couple of animated movies this month: Dragonball Super: Broly. I have some vague recollection of watching the original Broly movie, and I believe this one is much better. DBS Broly is a slightly more nuanced character than just "random raging monster" from the previous non-canon movie. The animation was okay, you could tell the animators were having fun with some of the battle parts. Also, I watched the English dub, and I just realized Goku's voice is super annoying, so I pity the Americans- Actually watched something in the cinema this month: Joker. I wasn't originally sure if I wanted to see it, I wasn't hyped for it at all in the months prior. But as the showing date came nearer, there was a lot of buzz around it so I decided to go anyway. I don't feel like it lived up to the hype and the warnings about promoting incel stuff, but at least it's one of the higher-grossing DC movies, so maybe we'll have more to come in that vein. MCU movies all have kind of same-y tone and feel, so probably
2019 September
- I finally got around to watching X-Men Dark Phoenix which I skipped when it came out mainly because (a) poor reviews, and while normally I'd have watched it anyway since I have not missed any of the X-Men movies in the cinema, not even the horrendous Wolverine Origins, there was also to consider that (b) I was in the US at the time and was only willing to spend my precious dollars on one expensive American cinema and Spider-man Far From Home won out. The movie wasn't that bad really, at least I felt better about it than the aforementioned
2019 August
- Hmm, surprisingly I haven't watched too much stuff this month. Eigasai I watched a Japanese film at Eigasai in UP Diliman for the first time ever, upon the invite of some friends. We saw One Cut of the Dead a comedy zombie film. It was great and it was hilarious, although you must make sure not to lose patience with the first thirty minutes. I went in blind not knowing anything about it other than "Japanese comedy zombie movie", so you should too! Easily one of the funniest movies I've seen in recent years. Young Justice Back half of Young
2019 July
- I was travelling for most of the past two months, so this covers both June and July, and I guess I haven't been able to watch too much. Maybe? IDK, we'll see. Since I was in the US, I took the opportunity to finish watching Voltron: Legendary Defender which only had two seasons available on PH Netflix. Pretty good adaptation, lots of fun callbacks to the old series. Some annoying filler eps, especially in the middle seasons onwards. I like how they spent the entire series going through the main Voltron villains one by one: first Zarkon, then Lotor, then
2019 May
- The big TV thing of May 2019 was of course, the much maligned finale for Game of Thrones. I've written about that separately here. Most of the US TV series also ended their runs in May. Arrowverse show seasons were littered with poor writing as usual. I rank the seasons in this order: best is Legends of Tomorrow season 4. The reason Legends is the best is that they're not afraid to be outrageous. My favorite moment was from before the midseason break, Puppets of Tomorrow! second best is Supergirl season 4. I don't like that Supergirl always felt very
- After a much-maligned eighth and final season, HBO's Game of Thrones is done. Unmarked spoilers follow. The eighth season was so notoriously bad, we got petitions asking for rewrites. Here's how I explained it to a friend after the notorious episode 5: It's not about characters being killed, it's about bad writing because they're cramming. The writers were determined to finish the show in 2 smaller seasons so they're skipping a lot of necessary character development and characters just do stupid things because the plot demands it. The most recent episode (spoilers follow, no apologies) has Dany do something really
2019 April
- I've already written extensively about Avengers Endgame, but there are other things I watched this month too. Shazam came out early this month, and while it was unfortunately sandwiched between MCU blockbusters, it was a fun adventure romp and surprised me in a few ways. I wrote a short spoiler-free review over on Tumblr. TV-wise, I've been on a rewatch binge of 30 Rock that unfortunately started with season 4 due to Amazon Prime's weird way of presenting things. I've already blown past the series finale and wrapped around to the start and currently at season 2, so close to
2019 March
- The big one this month was Captain Marvel. I posted the usual spoiler-free review over on Tumblr, but I have some more spoiler-y thoughts over here: (Spoilers) While I thought the movie was ok, I was underwhelmed by the third act and specifically the lack of any serious threat for Carol to defeat towards the end of the movie. As this tumblr post explains more clearly than I ever could, perhaps the issue is that the narrative is not something targetted towards me as a man, who has not experienced the emotional gaslighting IRL that many women are exposed to.
- If you haven't figured it out yet, I watch a lot of TV shows, rarely on TV itself though. I outgrew scheduled television maybe more than a decade ago. I'm reminded of this because I was going through some old disks and found burned episodes of stuff like Smallville, Heroes, The Simpsons, various anime, and so on. Those were from the days before streaming though. These days an abundance of content is available online via the streaming services, no need to store all those episodes yourself. I first tried out Netflix during my three-month London stint back in 2015 (which
Star Trek fans: You're probably already watching Discovery, but if you're not also watching The Orville, you're really missing out!
2019 February
- Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: I watched Alita: Battle Angel, with the friend who introduced me to the series in the first place. The movie looked fantastic and the fight scenes were great. Plot was supercondensed, several books' worth of story combined into one. Ended in a weird place, kinda? Easily the best western live action anime adaptation by far. On Feb. 7, 2019, 10:06 p.m. I wrote: Watched Alita: Battle Angel earlier today. Pretty good. Fast pace, excellent visuals and fight scenes. They tried to cram a lot of the
- Interesting article on closed captioning, or as I like to call them, subtitles. My first exposure to subtitles was anime of course, but these days I vastly prefer having subtitles on any show, even if it's dubbed in a language I do understand. From the article: “Why do you have captions on?" I asked. “It helps me with my ADHD: I can focus on the words, I catch things I missed, and I never have to go back," she replied. “And I can text while I watch." I don't think I have ADHD, that's not something diagnosed very often over
2019 January
- Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: Bumblebee only came out over here in January (thanks to the usual MMFF shenanigans), and I decided to watch it on a whim. Pretty decent soft reboot, read my spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr The first half of Young Justice Outsiders is out, and it's pretty good. Focus is back on a smaller group after the larger team in YJ season 2. A few new characters are introduced and I learned about a couple of DC heroes I wasn't familiar with before. Probably still the
